Irony and Life Insurance

Diverse FI (Life Insurance)

I call this blog Diverse Fi because my path to financial independence was not the typical one. Although I’ll talk more about this in another post, my journey neither started from humble beginnings nor was frugality my guiding principle. In fact, it was only after discovering the FIRE community, did I realize that I was indeed financially independent and didn’t need life insurance anymore.

That changed my life. Changed my habits. I slowly became more frugal than even before. I fired my financial advisor. Cut out bad spending habits. I started to question even the most minute expenditures.

That’s when the irony truly hit me.

Its kinda sad, kinda uplifting

I didn’t pay for college. I didn’t pay for medical school. In fact, I started my adult life with zero debt. Unlike some, it wasn’t because I won scholarships, or had a mentor, or created a stupendous hack to break the system. I didn’t even work my way through (I’ve always worked, but never enough to pay off such debts).

My dad died. When I was eight years old. He had a brain aneurysm and collapsed while rounding at the hospital. A life’s worth of hopes and dreams. Gone. My mom, me, and two brothers left behind.

My mother, the accountant, took the two hundred thousand dollars of life insurance and invested it in the early eighties. And it grew, and grew, and grew. Compounding through a wild ride in the stock market.

That money sent three children through college. Both my brothers through graduate school. Me through medical school. The last was distributed to each of us in the form of fifteen thousand dollar checks in the early two thousands.

Cutting the fat

So when it came time to renew my own term life insurance policy recently, I couldn’t help but think of my dad. His legacy had driven me to become a doctor, and his insurance had paved the way.

But the payout from my policy, bought years ago, was for about half of my current net worth. I am financially independent. I can self insure. If my wife and I can stop working at any time, we certainly no longer need to insure our lives. Our children will be fine with what we have already. They won’t need more.

So it was with a feeling of great heaviness and irony that I cancelled my policy. A policy similar to the one my father had lovingly left us.

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2 Responses

That’s quite a story — I had a similar revelation when I discovered the FIRE community. I couldn’t believe I had the option to just simply be done.

Sad to hear about your father’s sudden passing when you were so young. My boys are 7 & 9, and I can’t imagine how losing a parent would affect them (or the surviving parent). How tragic. Glad you came out of that situation and thrived.

Hey PoF. Thanks for stopping by. While my story has some sadness, I feel like I had a magical childhood. I was able to grow up and become a physician like my father and live a happy and full life. Hopefully the same would be true for my 10 and 13 year olds.